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作者：Annen, Kurt
作者单位：University of Guelph
摘要：In many situations, irreconcilable disagreements between players lead to costly ownership disputes over assets-for example, in case of joint ownership. This article studies the role of such disputes in a situation where two players have to make a transaction-specific investment and when contracts are incomplete. I show that potentially contested ownership may mitigate the inefficiency of investments due to the incompleteness of contracts generating an exchange surplus that comes closer to the ...
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作者：Schwartz, Warren F.; Wickelgren, Abraham L.
作者单位：Georgetown University; University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin
摘要：We introduce discovery into a model of settlement and negative expected value (NEV) suits under asymmetric information. The option to conduct discovery has several important effects. First, because discovery is cheaper than litigation, it reduces the defendant's incentive to settle under asymmetric information. Second, discovery must be credible. Because discovery is more valuable the greater the uncertainty it resolves, this introduces a credibility constraint on pre-discovery settlement offe...
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作者：Sweeting, Andrew
作者单位：Duke University
摘要：Commercial radio stations and advertisers may have conflicting interests about when commercial breaks should be played. This article estimates an incomplete information timing game to examine stations' equilibrium timing incentives. It shows how identification can be aided by the existence of multiple equilibria when appropriate data are available. It finds that stations want to play their commercials at the same time, suggesting that stations' incentives are at least partially aligned with th...
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作者：Anderson, Simon P.; de Palma, Andre
作者单位：University of Virginia; Universite Paris Saclay
摘要：Unsolicited advertising messages vie for scarce attention. Junk mail, spam e-mail, and telemarketing calls need both parties to exert effort to generate transactions. Message receivers supply attention according to average message benefit, while the marginal sender determines congestion. Costlier transmission may improve average message benefit so more messages are examined. Too many (too few) messages may be sent, or the wrong ones. A Do-Not-Call policy beats a ban, but too many individuals o...
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作者：Bessen, James; Maskin, Eric
作者单位：Boston University; Princeton University
摘要：We argue that when innovation is sequential (so that each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors) and complementary (so that each potential innovator takes a different research line), patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation as in a static setting. Indeed, society and even inventors themselves may be better off without such protection. Furthermore, an inventor's prospective profit may actually be enhanced by competition and imitation. Our seque...
